Hammerhead: The Making of a Carpenter

Nina MacLaughlin has a stable job at a Boston newspaper when she decides to hang it up and do something, possibly anything, else with her life. Not having so much as wielded a hammer before, she accepts a job as a carpenter's assistant and embarks on the life of a journeyman carpenter, learning to tile bathrooms, build decks, and renovate entire rooms. In describing and understanding the metamorphosis, MacLaughlin relies on the words of those as varied as Greek mythology, Studs Terkel, Virginia Woolf, and Pliny the Elder.

Although it sounds like the plot of a promising novel, Hammerhead is actually MacLaughlin's memoir. Beautifully written, and wise beyond its years, Hammerhead has the goods to make any reader question the decisions they've made thus far, and whether they're the right ones. In the opening chapter, MacLaughlin writes, "Inertia and fear and laziness, the three-headed dog that keeps us from leaving situations that have passed their expiration date..." and I was hooked. How better to describe the reasons that keep many of us where we are.

This sentiment is book-ended by what can by a question that many of us, I'm sure, have asked ourselves on occasion: "How do we decide what's right for our own lives? The question never gets easier to answer. If we're luck and we pay attention, pieces here and there will start to fit together." Her words put me in mind of Abraham Verghese's beautifully blunt prose in Cutting for Stone where he writes, "We come unbidden into this life and if we are lucky we find a purpose beyond starvation, misery, and early death which, lest we forget, is the common lot."

Both authors, certainly, make the reader question choices, priorities, and the related decisions. I don't plan to leave my job and become a carpenter anytime soon, but I admire MacLaughlin's ability to create a new life while also - as evidence by both the writing of her memoirs, as well as the authors she chose to include within its covers - creating space for the old one. Deep roots are not reached by the frost.